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Kashmir separatists: Divided we stand

Ever since the outbreak of anti-India armed insurgency in 1989, the separatist camp in Kashmir has been a divided lot. While the militant groups mushroomed in early nineties, the trend continued later with the mushrooming of separatist political groups, many of them founded by erstwhile militant leaders.
Haroon Mirani analyses the phenomenon and its impact in Kashmir.

SrinagarSep 30, 2006:

“Pity the nation that is divided into number of groups and each group calling itself the nation” Kahlil Gibran.

The large number of groups claiming to fight for the resolution of Kashmir dispute has always confused people here. Different voices often in collision have only led to dismay among the populace.

For some years the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), an alliance of more than 25 separatist groups in Kashmir founded in 1993, filled the vacuum of a centralised leadership in the divided separatist camp.

“We founded APHC as an umbrella group, to provide a centralised platform,” says Miwaiz Umar Farooq the founder chairman of APHC.

The APHC split into two groups in 2003 with hardliner leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani calling the split a ‘purification process’.

There are two APHC’s now, each claiming to represent the aspiration of Kashmiris. The APHC when it was united was in itself a divided house with the constituents differing in principle on many a basic issue. The division however does not end here.

Almost every constituent of APHC is divided, and then there are a number of separatist groups, outside the APHC, each claiming to fight for the resolution of Kashmir issue.

In principle perhaps all of them differ with their own self on what the resolution stands for.

“It is wrong to call the separatist camp divided. It is disintegrated into so many small fractions, so many useless factions,” says Shabir Ahmad a student at the University of Kashmir.
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